Here’s the thing. If I wanted to find myself a grown-up prostitute, I think I could do so quite easily. I have done so a couple of times it in the past, though, admittedly not since several decades ago, and I never made a habit of it, but although the world has changed quite a lot since then, and although I have not made any deliberate efforts to keep up with how one finds oneself a prostitute, I have very little doubt that I could figure it out again quite easily if I wanted to. It was not hard to figure out, back when I was young and very naïve.
I have also (again admittedly, long in the past) quite a few times been to bars or walked down streets where prostitutes would solicit business from me or other passing guys, sometimes quite persistently. (With just a couple of exceptions, I always either ignored them or turned them down, even though some were quite persistent.)
I never saw anything, however, to suggest that any of them were being forced to prostitute themselves by men, or forced in any way, except perhaps by economic need. I suppose, in some cases, there may have been pimps in the background somewhere, but if so they were well out of sight, and in many cases I really find it very hard to believe that there was anything like that going on at all. The women (with maybe one exception - an offer I turned down) seemed to be in business for themselves, and fairly well in control of the transactions. (One of them I remember, had a large dog, presumably to keep the “Johns” in line.)
More to the point, however, I was never solicited by anyone who could conceivably have been underage, and never heard a ghost of a hint of anyone who might be offering to find me sex with underage girls. Although, as I said, I think I could probably quite easily figure out how to find myself a grown-up prostitute right now, if I wanted to, I have absolutely no idea how I would find myself an underage prostitute. The only possible ways I can think of to even look for one (like Googling), would, I should think, quite quickly get me arrested, and even if they somehow didn’t get me arrested, I have absolutely no confidence that they would actually work.
I do not doubt that underage prostitutes (and, also, technically adult, but young and vulnerable, women forced into “sexual slavery”) do exist, but it seems to me that if they existed in large numbers, there would have to be a large market and some degree of not-too-thoroughly-concealed marketing for them. You would see some signs of it if (as I once occasionally did) you hung around places where prostitution goes on. I never saw any such signs. I can only imagine that if you really do want to find an underage “enslaved” prostitute, you have to know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone … and all those someones will have to have some degree of trust in the next guy down the line. Business does sometimes get done in that sort of way, I suppose, especially criminal business, but it does not get done efficiently, in mass amounts.
It seems to me that if trafficked, underage prostitutes existed in large numbers in our society, many of us, or at least many men, and most men with any experience of the world of prostitution (even my quite limited sort of experience, as an observer and, on a very small handful of occasions, a client), would have occasionally been offered their services, or would know someone who had, or at least would have a pretty shrewd idea about how to go about finding them. I have never had a hint of such an offer (despite many “offers” from adult prostitutes - almost all refused), and I have no idea how I might go about finding such services. I conclude that they are very hard to come by, are probably only ever found via considerable persistence, and the taking of some serious risks, by people (who must, surely, be a tiny minority of men) who really, really crave such services, and that the numbers of people who provide the services (both the numbers of those who control the business, and the numbers of “slaves” they have to offer) are, therefore, quite small.
In short, if there were thousands upon thousand of people involved in this trade, we would all know about it, and many or even most men would either have been offered the services, or would know someone who had. We all know about the illegal drug trade after all, and most people, even if they have never bought illegal drugs themselves, have been offered them or at least know people who have been offered them. It just does not seem to be like that with the “sex trafficking” trade, presumably because it does not exist on anything remotely approaching the same scale.